Emma C. Teeling

Emma Caroline Teeling is an Irish zoologist and geneticist, who has specialised in the phylogenetics of bats. Her work, widely cited, includes both understanding of the bat genome and aid in conservation of bats, and work on how insights from other mammals such as bats might contribute to better understanding and management of aging and a number of conditions, including deafness and blindness, in humans. She is a full professor at University College Dublin, where she has founded two scientific centres: the Laboratory of Molecular Evolution and Mammalian Phylogenetics (sometimes known as the "BatLab"), and the Centre for Irish Bat Research. She is widely cited in her areas of study, and is an elected member of her national academy, the Royal Irish Academy.

Early life

Emma Teeling was born to John and Deirdre Teeling; her father is an academic and entrepreneur, while her mother is an academic in the area of education. They married in 1971. She has two brothers, Jack and Stephen, and she and her siblings grew up in Clontarf, a northern suburb of Dublin.

Teeling took a B.Sc. in Zoology at University College Dublin (UCD). She then studied at the University of Edinburgh for an M.Sc. in Animal Behaviour and Welfare, including working at the Cochrane Ecological Institute in Canada, before pursuing a Ph.D. at Queen's University, Belfast and the University of California at Riverside. She defended her thesis on A molecular perspective on chiropteran systematics, and received the Ph.D. in molecular phylgenetics in 2002.

Career

Teeling worked as a postdoctoral research fellow from 2002 to 2004 at the US National Cancer Institute. In 2005, she took a role as lecturer in Evolution and Genetics in the School of Biology and Environmental Science at UCD, securing tenure in 2006. She founded the Laboratory of Molecular Evolution and Mammalian Phylogenetics (sometimes known as the "BatLab" even in official materials)) at UCD in 2005, and the Centre for Irish Bat Research at UCD in 2008; she remains one of the four Principal Investigators of this cross-border project, and its director. The Laboratory of Molecular Evolution and Mammalian Phylogenetics conducts a large amount of field work in Brittany, working with a conservation organisation, Bretagne Vivante.

Teeling was promoted to associate professor (in Evolution and Genetics) in 2012, and later to full professor. In addition to her research work, she teaches or coordinates a number of courses, and supervises Ph.D. studies. As of 2020, she is also Deputy Director of UCD's Earth Institute.

Research and funding

Over the first 15 years since PhD qualification, Teeling secured over 4.4 million euro in research funding for her projects and laboratories. She was one of three applicants selected for a Science Foundation Ireland President of Ireland Award in 2006, providing committed funding of over 1.2 million euro over its duration from October 2006 to March 2012 for comparative genomic studies in mammals. She also secured Science Foundation Ireland funding of over 200,000 euro for a study of the population dynamics and conservation status of a small bat, and a small grant for work around ecology and evolution with reference to bats.

An award was secured from the European Research Council, for a Starting Investigator work (2013-2018), supported by further SFI commitments. This resulted in the Ageless project, considering how bats weighing as little as 7g can live for over 40 years, possibly due to optimised telomere management.

Teeling was the co-founder of the Bat1K project to sequence the genomes of all living bat species.

Recognition

Teeling was elected to the highest academic honour in Ireland, membership of the national academy, the Royal Irish Academy, in 2016. In 2017, For her scientific work, she was awarded the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Academiques; this award, known as "the purple", is the oldest civilian decoration in France, established by Napoleon. Her husband was also made a Chevalier at the time, for his work in astrophysics.

Publication

She has written and co-written many articles, papers and chapters, some of which are widely cited. There are more than 100 active documents, with a citation level, per Scopus, of 6424 applications across 4751 citing documents, and a h-index of 31 ("very good"). Chapters contributed include:

• Bats (Chiroptera) in The Timetree of Life (Hedges, Kumar, eds)
• Phylogeny, Genes, and Hearing: Implications for the Evolution of Echolocation in Bats in Bat Bioacoustics (Fenton et al, eds)

Popular media

Teeling has presented a TEDx talk, on the genome of bats, which has been viewed, as of September 2020, more than 540,000 times. University College Dublin has also uploaded one of her lectures, "Bats: secrets of extended lifespan', to Youtube. She has been interviewed and featured on radio and television. On one occasion programme-makers accompanied her team when it was locating bats in old churches in Brittany.

Governance and voluntary roles

Teeling was appointed to the board of the Irish Research Council. She was elected as one of the professorial members of the Governing Authority of UCD in 2019, for a five-year term.

Personal life

Teeling is married to astrophysicist Peter Gallagher, a senior professor at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies; they met in first year Science in UCD. They have two sons. Teeling invested in the first round of funding for her brothers' whiskey distillery company, the Teeling Whiskey Company, operating the Teeling Distillery, the first new distillery in Dublin for 125 years.